DEA let fentanyl pills reach New Mexico streets, whistleblower tells AP

Albuquerque,UPDATED: Jun 22, 2026 12:14 IST

The US Drug Enforcement Administration allowed hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to reach the streets of New Mexico between 2023 and 2025 while it pursued larger trafficking cases, according to three current and former DEA agents and government records reviewed by The Associated Press. The issue has raised questions over a law enforcement tactic that critics said put public safety at risk during the deadliest drug crisis in US history.

The DEA said the decisions were lawful and consistent with Justice Department guidance, while former US attorney for New Mexico Alex Uballez said the approach was part of a wider effort to build stronger cases against major traffickers. But DEA Special Agent David Howell, who filed a whistleblower complaint in 2023, told AP the agency had failed communities by watching drug shipments move without seizing them.

According to the report, DEA agents repeatedly tracked fentanyl consignments but did not always stop them as federal prosecutors tried to target larger organisations. Howell said, "We poisoned our community to make cases." He added, "Through our own willful blindness, we get to say, We don't really know what happened to the drugs. But we 100 per cent got people killed."

The report said New Mexico remains at the centre of the fentanyl crisis. While overdose deaths across the US fell 14 per cent last year, government data showed a 21 per cent rise in New Mexico. The White House had last year described fentanyl as a "weapon of mass destruction", and the DEA had made its removal from the streets a top priority over the past decade.

AP said that in some cases, the DEA had highly detailed intelligence on deliveries. In June 2023, agents intercepted coded phone conversations and watched a deal at a mobile home park in Albuquerque, later recording that traffickers had delivered 74,000 pills. Federal prosecutors later confirmed that figure in a court filing. Another report days earlier showed investigators watching the same network deliver a spare tyre concealing another suspected fentanyl shipment that was also not seized. Howell said, "We did nothing, but sit back and watch."

Months later, authorities arrested the traffickers, but Howell said the unseized shipments could not be accounted for. Tristan Leavitt, president of whistleblower advocacy group Empower Oversight, said, "It's outrageous to put that many lives at risk in hopes of making a big case." A former DEA supervisor, who spoke anonymously for fear of retaliation, said he and colleagues in Albuquerque had allowed "millions" of pills to go unseized during a multi-state investigation last year. Howell said in his whistleblower disclosures that agents in that case had allowed the delivery of at least 1.8 million fentanyl pills.

That investigation later led to what the DEA described as the biggest fentanyl seizure in its history. Announced in May 2025 by then attorney general Pam Bondi, the operation led to the seizure of more than 3 million pills. The former supervisor said, "The amount we ultimately seized was hitting the streets every month while that case was going on," and added that the organisation could have been dismantled six months earlier. Uballez defended the broader strategy, saying estimated pill counts "based on intercepted phone calls are not reliable". He said, "I don't think I'd contest that drugs are walked," but added that the scale and frequency were "incredibly difficult to answer in retrospect". He also said, "The bigger fish are worth catching," and that doing so "will save more lives".

The legal and policy debate centres on how fentanyl should be handled in ongoing investigations. AP reported that the Justice Department adopted "Fentanyl Protocols" in 2017 directing agents to "seize or otherwise prevent the distribution" of fentanyl "as soon as practicable" and stating that "protecting public safety is paramount". The rules were revised in 2024 to give investigators more discretion, allowing them to weigh risks to public safety against "the benefits to be achieved through preserving the investigation". The DEA said in a statement that "the investigative decisions at issue were lawful, reasonable under the circumstances and consistent with Department guidance". DEA spokesperson Amanda Wozniak added, "Public descriptions suggesting that DEA knowingly permitted fentanyl to reach communities are false and fundamentally mischaracterise the facts," and said the cases involved court-authorised wiretaps, real-time surveillance and intelligence gathering aimed at larger trafficking organisations.

AP also reported that several current and former agents compared the tactic to "Operation Fast and Furious", the 2011 gun-walking scandal in which US agents allowed weapons to be trafficked into Mexico in an effort to trace them to cartel leaders. The report noted that the Justice Department later explicitly barred agents from allowing firearms to be trafficked.

Howell said his concern deepened as he began linking overdose deaths to pills the DEA had allowed to move through the market. One case he flagged involved a 15-month-old child who died after ingesting burned fentanyl residue last year in Espaola. Howell, a 19-year DEA veteran who previously served a decade in the Navy, took his allegations to the US Office of Special Counsel. That office initially found a "substantial likelihood of wrongdoing" and asked the Justice Department to investigate.

In early 2024, Howell told the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility that DEA agents had observed but not seized separate deliveries of 150,000 and 50,000 fentanyl pills. He said the DEA and federal prosecutors "are placing themselves in a precarious position where they will not be able to prove that the fentanyl they could have stopped did not result in the death of a person". The Office of Professional Responsibility later found that the DEA and the US attorney's office had acted reasonably and that their inaction posed no "specific danger to public health". The Office of Special Counsel accepted that finding as reasonable.

Howell said he faced consequences after speaking out. According to Howell and DEA records cited by AP, he was moved to desk duty for more than a year, his performance ratings were reduced, and prosecutors stopped him from testifying in federal court, citing what records described as his "pattern of refusing to heed" instructions to allow drugs to go unseized during long investigations.

The AP report presents a sharp dispute over how far investigators can go in pursuing larger drug networks while a lethal substance remains on the streets. While the DEA and former prosecutors said the decisions were justified under the circumstances, Howell and other current and former agents said allowing fentanyl shipments to continue risked lives in communities already struggling with the drug crisis.

With PTI Inputs

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